Langley Hyde’s short fiction has recently appeared in Terraform, Persistent Visions, and Unidentified Funny Objects 6, edited by Alex Shvartsman. Her novel, Highfell Grimoires, was named a Best Book of 2014 in SF/Fantasy/Horror by Publishers Weekly. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner, two children, and a rickety old cat.

Jen Albert is an entomologist, writer, editor, narrator, game-player, cosplayer, streamer, reader of All The Things, and haver of far too many hobbies.

Jen somehow became co-editor of her favorite fantasy fiction podcast; she now wonders if she’s still allowed to call it her favorite. She works full-time as an editor and lives in Toronto with her very large, very hairy German Shepherd.

This was a really good, thoughtful story! I liked so many things about it - Elusia's character and how she wasn’t sure what she wanted or what she felt, because everything was too complicated for that - and how Bloodrain was portrayed as a someone capable of loving his wife and daughter despite all the horrible horrible things he did.

As a German that story of course reminded me of the Nürnberg Trials and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, and how the generation born in the 1930s/40s (like my mom) rebelled against their parents around 1968. The "inter-species" relationship of the protagonist reminded me of Jennifer Teege's memoir "My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me" (which I haven't read though). All in all, I felt the parallels to post war Germany made this a bit too much of a metaphor, but the the story was still quite good.

I love this story. Ms. Hyde presents a powerful description of what it feels like to be torn between love and anguish because of a criminal parent. Surely any person who has an incarcerated parent must feel some degree of this pain, especially if the relationship was intact before the parent was sentenced.Ms. Hyde has not tried to tell the story of war criminals, the justice they rightly face, how society views their offspring; how evil keeps visiting pain and suffering on the generations that come after it, even once it faces justice. She has told the story of one woman's life with a loving, but monstrous, father, in beautiful, simple language, and because she tells Elusia's story so well, all of the themes I mentioned are thoughtfully addressed without pretension or preachiness. Because she has set this story on a fantasy world, I believe she freed herself to not be bound by the historical accounts any actual human war criminals, and yet her Verus Bloodrain could be any one of them, or a composite of any number of them.“He believed he deserved to rule the world,” she said, “and that he could do it better than anyone else because he was more thoughtful and intelligent.”Thank you, Ms. Hyde, for a truly enjoyable read.

In the end, his promise was kept. Really interesting; she was not allowed to fondly remember her childhood, as it was tainted by her father's crimes. Still not sure what the prosecutor's daughter meant by telling her she was lucky. Was the daughter just referring to the fact that her own father didn't pay any attention to her?